Yes, Virginia, Obama Is A Socialist

Like conservatism, socialism takes many different forms and the socialists don’t always agree on the way to advance their agenda. But have no doubt, President Obama is a socialist.

Any normal person would say that such an income tax system is more than fair, or maybe that “the rich” pay more than their fair share. So why does President Obama keep saying that the rich do not pay their fair share? Is he ignorant? Wouldn’t somebody in his Administration whisper to him that he is peddling nonsense?

The answer is that to President Obama this is still not fair because he is a Marxist. To a Marxist, the fact that the top 1% earn more income than the bottom 99% is not fair, no matter how they earn it, fairly or not. So it is not fair unless more is taken from the top 1% until they are left only with what they “need,” as in any true communist system. Paying anything less is not their “fair” share. That is the only logical explanation of President Obama’s rhetoric, and it is 100% consistent with his own published background.

Notice that Obama keeps saying that “the rich,” a crass term implying low class social envy, don’t “need” the Bush tax cuts. That is reminiscent of the fundamental Marxist principle, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”

Good tax policy is not guided by “need.” It is guided by what is needed to establish the incentives to maximize economic growth. The middle class, working people and the poor are benefited far more by economic growth than by redistribution. That is shown by the entire 20th century, where the standard of living of American workers increased by more than 7 times, through sustained, rapid economic growth. (Read More)

See Jonah Goldberg, at Commentary in 2010, “What Kind of Socialist Is Barack Obama?” There are a lot of different terms at stake here. Ferrara explicitly places Obama’s consistent redistributionism within the Marxian class-struggle paradigm. Goldberg sees Obama more in terms of the stagnant European variety of democratic socialism. Personally my sense is that the only thing holding Obama back from a truly Marxist public-ownership-of-the means-of-production model are the enormous liberty restraints in the American constitutional system and political order. Obama knows this, of course. He knows that the left must chip away at these liberty restraints piecemeal to bring about the socialist utopia. You bore through the institutions over the long haul, and it’s working. The monstrous ObamaCare health collectivization is the tip of the iceberg.

I had a liberal tell me he’s not a Socialist, and proceed to read the definition from Webster’s. To which I reply that the dictionary definition of a word is not a political philosophy and he should probably read The Communist Manifesto and see if there’s anything in there that makes his heart quicken with excitement. We’re doomed because the American public has been so dumbed down they don’t recognize 6th grade vocabulary words, never mind dangerous political direction. Like a cancer, the Progressives started as a small cyst and have quickly blown through the Nation’s entire lymph system. We’re screwed and now it’s time to actively look out for ourselves.